1998 United States embassy bombings

The 1998 United States embassy bombings occurred on 7 August 1998, in which 224 people were killed and more than 4,000 wounded in truck bomb explosions at the US embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya. The bombings were carried out by al-Qaeda and Egyptian Islamic Jihad as retribution for the US involvement in the extradition of four EIJ jihadists from Albania, and they brought al-Qaeda to the attention of the US public for the first time.

History
al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden claimed that the Rwandan Genocide and a plan to partition Sudan were both planned at the US East African embassies, and he scheduled the attacks for the eighth anniversary of the arrival of US troops in Saudi Arabia at the start of the Gulf War, an event which he saw as a crusader invasion. In May 1998, Ahmed Salim Swedan purchased a beige Toyota Dyna truck in Nairobi and a Nissan Atlas refrigeration truck in Dar es Salaam, and a bomb was built at a villa in Nairobi purchased by the bombers.

On 7 August 1998, suicide bomber Azzam and Mohamed Rashed Daoud al-Owhali drove the Dyna quickly toward the Nairobi embassy, firing on a security guard. al-Owhali exited the vehicle, intending to shoot the guards and clear a path for the truck, but he left his pistol in the truck and ran off. As the security guard radioed in for backup, the truck detonated. The nearby Ufundi Building, which housed a secretarial college, collapsed as a result of the bombing, taking with it most of the victims of the Nairobi attack.

Meanwhile, Egyptian jihadist Hamden Khalif Allah Awad (nicknamed "Ahmed the German" due to his blond hair) drove the Atlas refrigerator truck into the upscale Oysterbay neighborhood of Dar es Salaam, where the embassy was located, but a water truck prevented the bombers from getting closer to the embassy. The death toll from the Dar es Salaam bombing was considerably smaller than the Dar es Salaam bombing.

The "Liberation Army for Holy Sites", a cover used by the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, took credit for the bombings. The bombings led to Operation Infinite Reach, a series of US cruise missile strike on al-Qaeda bases in Afghanistan and a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan.